HELL-o again.
Wanted to share a piece I recently bumped into while browsing the web. It´s a painting by none other than David Lynch; without a doubt one of my favorite artists. The fucker is a very famous filmmaker, but he is also an incredible painter and designer, he does everything well, he even did an amazing comic book strip, and published it in a newspaper for some time. It´s quite infuriating, his Midas touch.
It´s infuriating but it´s also of course a great source of joy and inspiration. May he live forever.
Anyway, this is the piece I bumped into:
You may or may not realize right away why it´s genius. Let me tell you what this piece stirs in me, and then share a piece of my own that I find pertinent.
There is this whole deal, this whole idea "the conflict between the soul and the body" between the material world and heaven, between God and man, between fantasy and reality, between the message and its medium.
I talked about this subject before, in my video titled "Vitruvian Man", published as part of the promotion for my Kickstarter campaign.
The reason why I find Lynch´s image so genius is that it proposes a fantastic solution to the apparently impossible problem. A painting of a phone, a technological device used for communicating, transmitting a message across vast distances, is featured, and then another symbol, a word, is written near it "hello". Of course it is but a PAINTING of a phone, and the word is also a SYMBOL for a sound, and the sound itself could be said to be CARRYING a message, an intent etc, so it´s you know "shells all the way down" in a way, recalling the very famous painting by René Magritte "The Treachery of Images".
This is what I call "self-aware" art. Art that illustrates itself. I aim to produce such art, I try in fact to have a layer of awareness inscribed into everything I do.
Case in point, the sequence/picture below this paragraph, the start of "IN HELL".
It is to illustrate the reader´s arrival, YOUR arrival into the work. The story of Johnny, Arthur, Dexter, Willow, Barbie and Christine, six characters you know very well, is meant to be YOUR story. In the sequence, you can look at an impossible picture; a picture of your absence (the white space) then, your arrival (in the form of an icon that denotes the presence of a gaze upon a picture; a cross-hair) finally, the icon blossoms into a drop of water, and we have arrived, together, IN HELL.
PS: notice the number and arrangement of water drops that form the ephemeral crown, foreshadowing future events. ALSO: rest assured, work on chapter II continues!
See you next week!
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